With the Academy Awards coming up Feb. 22, people around the world are thinking about their favorite movies, actors, directors and even sound tracks. For some of us in the world of city parks, we watch movies through a narrower lens: scenes shot in parks.

It was a warzone. A plastic battlefield. Shards of plastic were strewn about, peppering the snow-covered slopes with colorful bits of rubble, edges sharp as knives. Debris of all shapes and sizes in scattered piles atop the hill overlooked the shattered wreckage down below. It was a plastic wasteland.

It's a city that offers so much. It's also a city that can easily break your budget! NYC living doesn't always equal cheap living. However, there is plenty to do for free or relatively inexpensively in the city that might not make it into some of the guidebooks.

Every city has the one hotel whose fortunes have run parallel to the local economy and history. The owners and operators of these hotels are merely curators as the properties pass through decades and centuries of hospitality.

Every year around this time, I get the New York City Marathon bug. My usual every-other-day run generally takes me to Central Park, where I loop around for three or four miles, sometimes doing the full six.

The Conservatory Garden is a place of peace and beauty like no other in the park. Impeccably manicured gardens, hilarious and emotional bench dedications, the Secret Garden water lily pool, the Untermyer fountain... I will let my pictures do the rest of the talking for me.

After 10 months of filming New York's Greatest Living Icons, the gentle carriage horses, those who love them... and those who hate them, I can say, without equivocation, there is no abuse, no cruelty of any kind, only love...and lots of carrots.

The distance from Nottingham, England to New York City's Central Park is roughly 3,383 miles. As with many UK born artists, the time zones and ocean divide hasn't prevented singer-songwriter Liam Bailey from making himself at home within the American convention of blues and rock and roll.

Detroit is probably the only city with a beach, lounge chairs, a full-on beach bar, grassy amphitheater, painted pianos, basketball courts, a sand volleyball court, a ping pong table, a foosball table and food trucks all in the central downtown park.